In the following excerpt, Davis summarizes critical reaction to Bly's The Man in the Black Coat Turns and Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, works he associates with the poet's exploration of male and female consciousness, respectively.

In the following essay, originally published in 1989, Kalaidjian probes Bly's subversive poetics—including his imagistic “repression of history” and his critique of American consumer culture and foreign policy—and concludes by assessing Bly's “woefully lacking” theory of matriarchy.

In the following essay, Sugg examines Bly's early poetic mode, his use and conception of imagery, and his principal themes, particularly those of self-discovery and the development of the soul.

In the following essay, Molesworth surveys Bly's poetic style, ideas, influences, political poetry, pastorals, prose-poems, and finally his long, visionary work Sleepers Joining Hands.

In the following interview, Dodd and Bly discuss the “domestication” and homogenization of contemporary American poetry.

In the following excerpt, Davis offers an overview of the poems in Silence in the Snowy Fields and This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years, comparing the collections structurally and thematically, and maintaining that they adumbrate the important ideas and images Bly addressed throughout his career.

In the following essay, Libby interprets Bly as a mystical poet, comparing the verses of the early collection Silence in the Snowy Fields with the more political poems of The Light Around the Body.

In the following essay, Harris explicates Bly's poem “Walking Where the Plows Have Been Turning,” emphasizing its “feminine” principles of intuition, empathy, and integration.

In the following essay, Davis explores Bly's representation of political themes via the metaphor of light and darkness in his collection The Light Around the Body.

In the following review, Dacey characterizes This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood as “a book of deep religious longings,” concentrating on the various qualities of Bly's poetic persona that surface in these prose-poems. The critic concludes with a comment on the fourteen short poems of Bly's collection The Loon, which demonstrate the reserved side of the poet.

In the following essay, Zavatsky addresses a number of theoretical problems in Bly's work in relation to the poet's thoughts on narrative, the feminine, confession, and other significant element of modern poetry.

In the following essay, Nelson describes the suggestive impact and quick, emotive brilliance of Bly's “tiny poems.”

In the following essay, Molesworth studies Bly's This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood as a poetic challenge filled with “pastoral delight” and suffused with the religiosity that Bly confers on bodies and bodily sensation.

Bly has touched and often irritated virtually every poet and every issue in contemporary poetry in at least one of his roles: editor, satirist, theorizer, organizer, translator, regionalist, prizewinner, and iconoclast. One might well say, as Eliot said of Pound and Chinese poetry, that Bly has invented South American poetry for our time. No literary history of the last twenty years would be complete without reference to Bly's magazine, The Sixties. And few social aestheticians would ignore Bly...

In Sleepers Joining Hands, Robert Bly offers his readers a various weave of the personal and the public, the psychological and the political modes of experience. Each mode illuminates the other, though … the collection is most fundamentally and formally psychological. The layout of the book is pleasantly indirect: two dozen pages of poems, ranging from haiku-like meditation moments to longer poems of protest. Then there is the essay, a short course in the Great Mother, an analysis of the disturbing b...

In the following excerpted review of The Man in the Black Coat Turns, Perloff observes the autobiographical and inward-looking qualities of the collection, and comments on Bly's translation of poems by the Chilean Pablo Neruda.

Robert Bly's poetry owes its appeal in part to vivid descriptions of the region around Madison, Minnesota, where he has spent much of his life. The chief concern of his verse, however, is not the objective portrayal of external nature but, rather, the presentation of various states of mind. Natural surroundings assume importance for him either as influences contributing to thoughts or emotions or as media of symbolic expression. Along with James Wright, James Dickey, Robert Kelley and others, Bly has...

In the following excerpted review of The Light Around the Body, Leibowitz considers Bly a failed political poet.

[There] was a radical shift between [Robert Bly's] first and second books, Silence in the Snowy Fields and The Light Around the Body. Since then, however, Bly has not put aside one style or mode to take up another, as some other poets have tended to do. Rather, he has taken the discoveries made in the first two books and used them to write different sorts of poems simultaneously, and has mingled the ways of writing explored there in new ways. The result has been a fascinating body of work, a voice as...

In the following excerpted review of Silence in the Snowy Fields, Mills comments on the aim and style of Bly's poetry, seeing the work as a collection of purified and “concentrated understatement” allied to the world of nature rather than that of ideas.

In the following review of Sleepers Joining Hands, Helms judges Bly's forays into the Whitmanesque and the confessional mode of poetry to be lacking.

In the following review, Hall offers a series of observations on Bly's poetry and particularly on the final section of Sleepers Joining Hands, which he calls “the best of Bly's work.”

In the following review, Stitt deems the collection This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years uneven, viewing it as further evidence of a duality in Bly's career that allows the “teacher, preacher, and reformer” to overshadow the poet.

In the following excerpted review, Friedman compares Bly's Silence in the Snowy Fields with the work of contemporary, experimental poets and observes the energetic, restless nature of Bly's verse while lamenting it as “too taut” and “too enclosed.”

In the following review of This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years, Weinberger depicts Bly as a popular, influential, but ultimately “irrelevant” poet.

In the following review of Selected Poems, Stitt remarks on Bly's poetic journeys through natural, human, and spiritual worlds, his use of daring metaphors, and his allegiance to “the dark, the primitive, the nonrational.”

In the following review of Sleepers Joining Hands, Oates praises Bly's “powerful,” “unified,” and prophetic collection.

In the following review of Silence in the Snowy Fields, Ray views Bly's poetry as a laconic, intense, and opinionated one that contrasts with the dominant mode of confessional verse and challenges readers' notions of reality.

One of the key metaphors of [Light Around the Body], suggested in the title and alluded to in virtually every poem in the volume, is the metaphor which encompasses the dichotomy of light and darkness…. Light begins in a kind of twilight zone in which light and darkness seem to vie with one another for dominance. This is one of the ways in which Bly utilizes Boehme's notion of the "Two Worlds," a notion which Boehme tended, often, to describe in terms of a light-dark dichotomy...

In the following essay, Hansen explicates the allusions and imagery of Bly's poem of otherworldly communion, “Surprised by Evening.”

In the following review of The Man in the Black Coat Turns, Molesworth commends the work's structural variety and unity of persistent themes.

The experience of reading Sleepers Joining Hands … is a bit like slogging your way through a violent storm. The book begins in deceptive calm, with "Six Winter Privacy Poems."… Bly's central theme, beautifully rendered: the duality of inner and outer worlds, the deep duality of a consciousness often conflicted but existing here in a momentary state of peaceful coexistence. It's the American haiku, fully and quietly accomplished…. [However,] the final, freneti...

In the following review, Molesworth favorably compares the prose-poems of Bly's This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood with those of the poet's earlier collection, The Morning Glory.

Bly is most explicitly [a] mystic of evolution, [a] poet of "the other world" always contained in present reality but now about to burst forth in a period of destruction and transformation. Bly's poetry of the transformation of man follows logically from his early poetry of individual and private transcendence. Repeatedly, Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962) announces an "awakening" that comes paradoxically in sleep, in darkness, in death, an awakening depicted in surrealis...

Robert Bly has suggested that the prose poem surfaces in situations when the culture of a period is moving dangerously close to abstraction. It is almost as if the prose poem surfaces at a specific time in a specific culture as a way of maintaining the possibility of poetry in an age about to abandon it. Bly's notions would be interesting in the abstract; they are all the more interesting in that his own most recent poems are in prose. Since Bly tends to see himself as paradigm of the poet in our day...

Robert Bly is a windbag, a sentimentalist, a slob in the language. Yet he is one of the half-dozen living American poets who are widely read, and of them, the one whose work is most frequently imitated by fledgling poets and students of creative writing. His success, however, is less disheartening when considered as an emblem of an age—perhaps the first in human history—where poetry is a useless pleasantry, largely ignored by the reading public. (p. 503) Bly sees his mission as the restoration...

[As a poet] Mr. Bly has been limited by a relatively weak sense of the musical and connotative value of words; his poems often seem made of images and ideas alone. And he has a way of hectoring the reader (and quite possibly himself) into accepting his experience as visionary or profound—a tonality registered in his insistent exclamation points. ["This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years"] is culled from more than 16 years of work, but restricted, as he tells us in his introduction, ...

In the following review of The Night Abraham Called the Stars, the unsigned critic finds the verses of Bly's collection—inspired by Islamic religious poetry, the Bible, and great works of art and literature in the western tradition—sincere, but generally unable to match the grandeur of their subjects.

In the following review of Eating the Honey of Words, the unsigned critic laments the lack of subtlety and development in Bly's poetry.

In the following review, Tromp acknowledges the wisdom and delicate simplicity of Bly's Morning Poems, calling them the best the poet has written.

Nowadays, everything Bly touches becomes a holy cause and reason for another book. [In This Body is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood] he consecrates "the often neglected[?] medium of the prose poem." Like the snail in the book's twenty-one drawings by Gendron Jensen, Bly has crept into the shell of his own meditations and remains absorbed in Sufi poetry, Rilke, protozoa, animals, woods, and fog. The pilgrim's mecca is a small black stone, mysterious and impenetrable. One may admire...

[Robert Bly is a] poet I don't believe and never have. He explains in the preface to his new book, This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years, that he is aware of two consciousnesses, his own and those of the "inanimate" things around him: pebbles, moons, dry grass. For my part, this is Swedenborgian nonsense, very dangerous. It saps our minds as it saps the beauty of the natural world. Distance and difference are what make us conscious, not fuzzy homologies. But let it go; Bly writes ...

Robert Bly's prose poems have a parallel hallucinatory quality [to the drawings by Gendron Jensen that illustrate "This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood"]…. "My beloved is to me as a cluster of camphor," we read in the Song of Solomon (1:14); and the Ark, God told Noah (Genesis 6:14), was to be made "of gopherwood." The Ark was by some accounts an allegory for the body, and that's all the explanation you're going to get in these pag...